Antwerp

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Antwerp sits on the river Scheldt, about 40 kilometres north of Brussels, and for a brief, blazing stretch of the 16th century it was the richest city in Europe. Francesco Guicciardini, the Florentine envoy posted there, reported that hundreds of ships passed the port in a single day and 2,000 carts entered the city each week. Those numbers stagger even now. How did a city on a Belgian river become, in the words of the historian Fernand Braudel, "the centre of the entire international economy, something Bruges had never been even at its height"? And how did it fall, rise again, fall again, survive a V-2 missile campaign more intense than any other target in the entire war, and arrive in the 21st century as the second-largest metropolitan area in Belgium, home to 85 percent of the world's rough diamond trade and a fashion scene that shaped designers across two continents? The answers run from a Roman trading post through a folklore giant with a taste for severed hands, through Spanish soldiers, Napoleon's harbour dreams, and a heist in 2003 that still holds the record as the largest diamond theft of all time.

• 2. The Giant and the Name

  ›

  Early recorded versions of the city's name reach back to Roman coins found in the city centre, where the inscription reads Ando Verpia. A Germanic form, Andhunerbo, appears from around 567 CE, when Austrasia became a separate kingdom. A possibly Celtic version, Andoverpis, shows up in Dado's Life of St. Eligius from around 700 CE. Scholars have proposed that the Germanic root combines anda, meaning "against", with a noun from werpen, meaning "to throw", suggesting a mound thrown up against the river or a wharf built on alluvial deposit. A Celtic reading would translate as "those who live on both banks."

  The city prefers a livelier story. Folklore holds that a giant named Druon Antigoon lived beside the Scheldt and demanded a toll from every boatman who passed. Any sailor who refused lost a hand, which the giant then flung into the river. A young hero named Silvius Brabo eventually killed the giant and returned the favour, severing Antigoon's own hand and hurling it into the water. Scholars agree the tale almost certainly did not produce the name, but the city has never let accuracy spoil a good origin myth. A statue of Brabo still stands in the city's main market square, the Grote Markt, and the city's most famous biscuits are baked in the shape of a hand.

• 3. The Golden Century

  ›

  Antwerp's extraordinary rise began with the silting-up of the Zwin, which choked the older trading city of Bruges and sent its foreign merchant houses north. By 1504 the Portuguese had made Antwerp one of their main shipping bases, landing spices from Asia and exchanging them for textiles and metal goods. The city's own workers processed soap, fish, sugar, and especially cloth.

  By the first half of the 16th century, Antwerp accounted for an estimated 40 percent of world trade. The Stock Exchange opened in 1531 with an inscription offering its floor to merchants of all nations, making it the world's first purpose-built commodity exchange. The city became the sugar capital of Europe, importing raw cane from Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic plantations, attracting Italian and German refiners, and shipping the finished product to Cologne and beyond. Trade in cloth, wine from Germany, France and Spain, salt from France, and wheat from the Baltic filled the port alongside the pepper and cinnamon from Portuguese ships.

  The painter count in 1560 captures how extreme the prosperity had become: the city then held around 360 painters for a population of roughly 89,000, one painter for every 250 residents, making it the most important artistic centre north of the Alps. The painter Pieter Bruegel was among those who worked there. Moneylenders had established a lending network that reached as far as the English government, which borrowed from Antwerp financiers between 1544 and 1574 because London bankers were too small to operate at that scale. Braudel's verdict stands: nothing in Europe matched it.

• 4. Collapse and Conquest

  ›

  Three distinct boom cycles drove Antwerp's golden age: the first built on the pepper market, the second on American silver flowing in from Seville, which collapsed when Spain went bankrupt in 1557, and a third based on textiles that followed the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559. Each boom carried an inflationary undertow that squeezed workers at the lower end. The Portuguese merchants left the city in 1549. Numerous financial bankruptcies clustered around 1557.

  The religious upheaval of the Reformation brought violent riots to Antwerp in August 1566. When the Dutch revolt against Spain broke out in 1568, trade between Antwerp and the Spanish port of Bilbao collapsed. Then, on the 4th of November 1576, Spanish soldiers sacked the city in what became known as the Spanish Fury: 8,000 citizens were killed, several houses burnt, and the damage was assessed at over two million pounds sterling.

  The city joined the Union of Utrecht in 1579 and briefly became the capital of the Dutch Revolt. In 1585, Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza, recaptured it after a long siege. The surrender terms gave Protestant citizens two years to settle their affairs before leaving. Most of those who left headed to the United Provinces in the north, taking their capital and skills with them and helping to ignite what became the Dutch Golden Age. Antwerp's banking passed into the hands of Genoese merchants for a generation, and Amsterdam took its place as the region's commercial centre.

  The final blow came in 1648, when the Treaty of Munster that recognized Dutch independence stipulated that the Scheldt must be closed to navigation. That closure destroyed what remained of Antwerp's trading activities. It stayed in force until 1863, with only partial relaxation during French rule from 1795 to 1814 and during the period when Belgium was part of the Kingdom of the United Netherlands between 1815 and 1830.

• 5. Napoleon's Harbour Dream

  ›

  By 1800 Antwerp's population had sunk to under 40,000, its lowest point in centuries. Napoleon recognized the city's latent strategic value and assigned funds to enlarge the harbour by constructing a new dock, now still called the Bonaparte Dock, along with an access lock, a mole, and a deepened channel to admit larger ships. His stated ambition was to make Antwerp's harbour the finest in Europe, specifically to counter the Port of London and hamper British commercial expansion. He was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo before the plan could be completed.

  A generation later, the city was caught in the Belgian independence struggle. Belgian insurgents captured Antwerp in 1830, but the citadel held out under the Dutch General David Hendrik Chassé, who subjected the town to periodic bombardment. At the end of 1832 the French Northern Army, commanded by Marshal Gerard, besieged the citadel. In December 1832, after a defence the source describes as gallant, Chassé made an honourable surrender, ending the siege.

  As the Belgian state stabilised, Antwerp was seen as vital to the young nation's survival, and a double ring of Brialmont Fortresses was built roughly 10 kilometres from the city centre. The city presented itself to the world at a 1894 World's Fair attended by three million visitors. Nine years earlier, in 1885, the Scheldt closure that had been enforced since 1648 had finally ended, and the port could breathe again.

• 6. Wars, Missiles, and Recovery

  ›

  Antwerp was the first city to host the World Gymnastics Championships, in 1903, and in 1920 it hosted the Summer Olympics, the first Games held after the First World War and the only ones ever staged in Belgium. During that earlier war, the city had been the Belgian Army's fallback position after the defeat at Liege; an 11-day siege ended with the Germans taking the city and the Belgian forces retreating westward.

  In World War II the port made Antwerp a primary strategic target. Germany occupied the city on the 18th of May 1940. The British 11th Armoured Division liberated it on the 4th of September 1944. Almost immediately, German forces attempted to destroy the port to deny the Allies its use for resupply. Thousands of Rheinbote, V-1 and V-2 missiles were fired at Antwerp. The V-2 barrage directed at the city was greater than the total number of V-2s used against all other targets during the entire war combined. The port survived because the missiles' accuracy was poor.

  After the war, Antwerp's already sizeable pre-war Jewish population was supplemented by a new wave of Orthodox Jewish settlers, making the city one of only two places in 21st-century Europe with a substantial Haredi population, the other being London's Stamford Hill neighbourhood. A Ten-Year Plan running from 1956 to 1965 expanded and modernised the port's infrastructure with national funding, extending its linear layout along the Scheldt and connecting new satellite communities to the city.

• 7. Diamonds and the District

  ›

  Antwerp's connection to the diamond trade dates to the 16th century. The first diamond cutters guild was established in 1584, and the industry never fully left. By 1924 the city had over 13,000 diamond finishers. Since World War II, families from the Hasidic Jewish community have dominated diamond trading in Antwerp, though in recent decades Indian traders and Maronite Christians from Lebanon and Armenian merchants have become increasingly significant participants.

  Today, 85 percent of the world's rough diamonds pass through Antwerp's diamond district annually. In 2011 the industry's total turnover was 56 billion dollars. The city has four diamond bourses: the Diamond Club of Antwerp, the Beurs voor Diamanthandel, the Antwerpsche Diamantkring, and the Vrije Diamanthandel. Belgian Indian Jains alone control two-thirds of the rough diamond trade and supplied India with roughly 36 percent of its rough diamonds. The district was the site of the 2003 Antwerp diamond heist, which holds the record as the largest diamond theft of all time.

  The Port of Antwerp remains the backbone of the broader economy. Ranked second in Europe after Rotterdam and within the global top 20 by tonnage, it handled 235.2 million tons of cargo in 2018. The docklands hold five oil refineries and a petrochemical cluster second in scale only to the concentration around Houston, Texas. Four nuclear power plants at Doel generate electricity for the region. For all its medieval origins, Antwerp's economic weight today rests on the same riverine geography that drew those first Portuguese spice ships in 1504.

• 8. Fashion, Art, and the Living City

  ›

  Antwerp's artistic reputation in the 17th century rested on a school of painting that included Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens, and the Teniers family. Rubens's former home and studio is now the Rubenshuis museum. The Plantin-Moretus Museum, preserving the house of printer Christoffel Plantijn and his successor Jan Moretus, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005. Le Corbusier designed a residential building in the city, Maison Guiette, in 1926-1927 in collaboration with Belgian architect Paul De Meyer; it is also now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

  Starting in the 1980s, graduates of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts began achieving international recognition, a cohort eventually known as the Antwerp Six. The wider circle of designers shaped by the academy includes Raf Simons, Veronique Branquinho, Olivier Theyskens, and Kris Van Assche. From the 1990s, Antwerp deliberately rebranded as a world-class fashion centre, positioning itself alongside London, Milan, New York, and Paris.

  The Sfinks global pop festival has run annually since its first edition in 1976. Jazz Middelheim fills the open-air sculpture museum in Middelheim Park each summer. The Antwerp Zoo, which opened on the 21st of July 1843 and covers 10 hectares next to Central Station, houses more than 5,000 animals from over 950 species and participates in breeding programmes for endangered animals including the okapi, the bonobo, and the Knysna seahorse. The Nieuw Zuid neighbourhood, being built on the site of former railway tracks beside the river, is scheduled for completion in 2030, with buildings by architects including Peter Zumthor, Shigeru Ban, and Kazuyo Sejima.